X-TRA → Is Ever All Over? Pipilotti Rist's Survival Tactics

Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor, installation views, Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, September 1, 2021–June 6, 2022. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photos: Zak Kelley.

Behind a heavy velvet curtain, a dim new world awaits. For Pipilotti Rist’s Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor, the Geffen Contemporary’s massive warehouse is transformed into an indoor courtyard filled with projection-soaked tableaus. This non-chronological survey comprises three decades of Rist’s video and multimedia installations. On the landing of the opening steps, I might have missed a tiny video screen embedded in the floor, had the security guard not warned me to watch my step. The video features Rist naked in a bath of lava, writhing and reaching and screaming up to passersby for help. A large-scale exterior facade of a weathered house sits to the right of the stairs, beside a busted chain-link fence. Laundry hangs on a line. Each window frame in the house holds a glowing screen. The viewer is looking from the outside in, but the inside is outside. Videos with scenes of sea life, outer space, zoomed-in lips and penises, and freaky eyeballs undulate on a slow loop. Inside the house is a research room of sorts that houses books of Rist’s work and others that inspire her (Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik), a guest book visitors can sign as a collective poem, and some smaller video pieces.

As I wander through the main atrium, my motions feel slow, like walking underwater or wading through memory. The other visitors and I duck down hallways, feet pressing against cushy carpet, peering around corners, entering through unmarked doorways. We encounter strange objects, like a spherical television suspended in a bathing suit hanging from the ceiling (Digesting Impressions [Gastric endoscopy journey], 1996/2014). On a deserted patio, three lawn chairs encircle a tattered umbrella. A red sandbox, its color dulled from long days in the sun, sits sunken in the corner. It is creepily quiet, as if the family that once occupied the space was forced to suddenly flee. The labyrinthian exhibition plays with interiority, nature, technology, sex, and scale. The viewer’s experience of time becomes muddled. It feels like a fallout shelter in wonderland.

In his 2020 book Bunker: Building for the End Times, Bradley Garrett surveys various doomsday prepper projects across the globe. In one of the most surreal passages, Garrett visits the Survival Condo, an inverted skyscraper (called a “geoscraper”) that tunnels fifteen stories underground. Located eighteen miles from the geographical center of the United States, the luxury bunker was repurposed from a cold war US Government missile silo by a former government contractor and property developer named Larry Hall. Units in the geoscraper run from $1.5 to $4.5 million, with an additional $5,000 per month in residents’ association fees. Though no one actually lives there—yet—twelve of the fifteen available units have been purchased.

Toward the end of his tour of the facility, on level 11, 160 feet underground, Garrett glances out a window and is surprised to see that night had fallen. “My instant, physiological reaction was to assume that we must have been underground for longer than I thought,” he wrote. “Then I realized my mistake.” The window was in fact an LED screen. “I was watching a prerecorded past I was convinced was the present.”¹

This story came to mind when I viewed The Apartment (2006–19), one of the main installations in Rist’s show, which comprises a dozen or so works from a thirteen-year period. The large, windowless room (housed in the part of the Geffen that MOCA employees internally refer to as “the bunker”) holds a bed, a living room, a fireplace, and a dining table. All of these everyday items are overlaid with destabilizing projections. The domestic space is turned public—and shared. Visitors are permitted to playfully engage with a freedom uncommon to the typical museum experience. Some folks lie down on the bed while others inspect the various knickknacks scattered across the mantel and shelves. An upside-down map hanging on the wall amplifies the strangeness of our setting.

Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor, installation view, Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, September 1, 2021–June 6, 2022. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Zak Kelley.

In this environment, COVID-19 precautions feel especially stark. The number of visitors is limited by the museum, and we self-police as well, carefully calculating our proximity to each other—a gesture that feels counter to Rist’s sensual and physically present work. Nevertheless, the show invites a sociality that is felt throughout. With the excitement of children on a playground, we observe and interact with each other. In Das Zimmer (The Room, 1994– 2000), for example, I sit on a cartoonishly oversized sofa next to an older man holding a large TV remote. He changes the video on-screen rapidly and wordlessly, without consulting anyone else who may be watching. The next time I visit, I hold the remote anxiously, wondering when to change the channel. The scene feels like a practical joke about who is, in fact, in control.

Large video montages dominate two of the walls of The Apartment, showcasing Rist’s usual subjects: landscapes of fields and cacti and oceans, hands grazing leaves, feet splashing through water, fingers digging into dirt, and, of course, scrotums in the extreme close-up. The colors are bright and saturated, the effect kaleidoscopic. Looping and meandering, the videos don’t succumb to the logic of time. The other visitors and I gaze at images both pastoral and profane, and it feels like I’m watching a highlight reel—distant on a digital screen—that honors the best parts of a world eclipsed by a pandemic, environmental calamities, racial violence, and capitalist destruction.

The communal experience of the screens in Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor offers the possibility of beauty and collectivity. Rather than the rugged individualism, extremist paranoia, and billionaire escapism proffered by preppers, Rist presents a vision of a feminist tech-utopia built on connectivity, play, care, and imagination. I lie on the beanbags for almost an hour, feeling as though time has barely passed.

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Before constructing the geoscraper, Hall consulted a psychologist on ways to sustain residents’ sanity while living underground. The key, it seemed, was to create the illusion of aboveground, “pre-event” life. Including a grocery store was one method of giving a sense of normalcy. The psychologist told Hall: “This needs to feel like a miniature Whole Foods supermarket. We need a low black ceiling, beige walls, a tile floor, and nicely presented cases . . . [I]f people are locked in this silo and they have to come down here and rifle through cardboard boxes to get their food, you’ll have depressed people everywhere.”²

In Rist’s video I Couldn’t Agree With You More (1999), the artist wanders listlessly through a fluorescent supermarket, through aisles of sterilized produce and rows of packaged apples. Drifting through her head is a feral fantasy in which a group of naked people dances and darts wildly through the forest. She arrives back at her apartment and collapses in bed, seemingly despondent from routine and domesticity. I wonder if she is fantasizing about a distant world of long ago or a post-apocalyptic future still to come. In the case of the latter, the piece becomes hopeful; perhaps some wild new world will transport us from our melancholy. The video seems to suggest that, given the opportunity, we could create a reality better than the one we’ve been given.

Garrett found one commonality among his interview subjects: an anticipatory sense of relief. Almost everyone described an After that is calming and freeing: post work, post money, post the life of rigid responsibility that the current societal structure demands of us. Though life underground sounds deeply stressful to me, I certainly see the appeal of disruption, of something different—like the weird excitement many felt in early quarantine. Rist’s fantasy visions, however, imply less rebuilding of the social order and more basking in calamity, a freedom with its own sort of relief.

As opposed to survival through discipline and psychological tricks, several of Rist’s pieces propose a manic catharsis. In Sip My Ocean (1996), she covers Chris Isaak’s ballad “Wicked Game” in an atonal screech. Ever Is Over All (1997) follows a woman smashing car windows along a city street. I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) sees her chanting a riff on a Beatles lyric, devolving into a frenetic dance, her breasts spilling from the confines of her dress as she succumbs to hysteria. I can’t help but laugh as I watch each of these pieces; their irreverent joy is contagious. “I was trying to accept hysteria in myself and in others as a survival tactic,” Rist says. “I wanted to be free to explode into pieces and not be ashamed of that. Exploding into pieces of pleasure.”³

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The experience of Rist’s work is refreshing; it feels radical and freeing in its whimsy and possibility. It is also escapist. Rising from the beanbags to exit The Apartment feels like breaking a trance, butting up against the harsh apparatus of the museum again, as I notice the presence of Do Not Touch signs and the watchful gaze of security guards and gallery attendants. (Rist can’t offer us total agency, after all.) I check the time on my phone, wondering what updates I have missed, if anyone has tried to reach me. The space that had felt like a welcome sanctuary suddenly seems hollow and a bit lonely compared to the complicated reality outside. Of Hall’s geoscraper, Garrett writes, “Whereas many of the other dread merchants I’d met were selling visions of bunkers that didn’t actually exist, Hall had created a real bunker in which life outside seemed a distant simulacrum.”⁴ At the core of Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor, visitors are invited to lose themselves to time and focus instead on pleasurable, controlled images. Does Rist’s work, then, effectively pacify viewers the same way Hall hopes to pacify residents of the geoscraper? Are we too just watching a simulated reality as the one we know burns?

Rist’s angst seems to stem more from boredom than anger. Even in her most overtly violent piece, Ever Is Over All, the smashing of car windows is lackadaisical and her weapon of choice is a giant phallic flower; the protagonist in her blue dress is smiling and waving (at a nearby cop, no less), her task seeming un-urgent and random. The fantasy group in I Couldn’t Agree With You More is dancing and running, but I wonder how they are living and surviving. As a guest on the podcast 99% Invisible, Garrett asserts to host Roman Mars, “Disaster will forcefully realign our priorities.”⁵ But disaster is here and now. Perhaps Rist’s work has aged poorly in this way, as her artistic sensibility seems informed by the nineties—a time when global catastrophe didn’t seem quite as imminent to many populations. In our current state of widespread political and environmental doom, though, boredom seems a privilege only some can afford. It’s a relief to forget the world and loll in an ecstatic nihilism, but it is also a luxury. If there is beauty left at the end of the world, will the option to enjoy it be available to everyone? Is it any coincidence that most of Rist’s subjects are white?

I return again to the invitation of the show’s title. What does it mean to be a neighbor? What responsibilities does that role hold? What are the complications of sharing space with other people, beyond the hour or two spent sitting on a big couch in a museum?

It’s almost possible to take in the wondrous and wild natural scenes in Rist’s work without thinking of the very urgent and present crisis of climate change. Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor is touted as MOCA’s first carbon net-zero exhibition. The collective Artists Commit conducted a three-month carbon audit of the exhibition. Their report notes that Rist achieved a low carbon footprint “by sourcing local recycled material, shipping works by ocean containers, and serving a climate-conscious menu for the opening night dinner.”⁶ Rist’s studio purchased REDD+ carbon credits to offset the rest of its usage. Far from the radical nature of Rist’s art, the practice of carbon credits is very much in line with neoliberal environmentalism, which posits that the planet will be saved through the magic of the marketplace rather than direct government planning and intervention. It allows players to pay to pollute, rather than requiring them to pollute less. The answer to the question of who owns the end of the world is, unsurprisingly, whoever can afford it.

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Here in Los Angeles, life on the edge of destruction is part of the psychic and physical landscape. It’s understood that the End Times may be brought on by any number of catastrophes, all of which are already underway: fire, flood, earthquake, drought, poisoned water and air, governmental inaction, economic devastation, war, plague. Garrett tells Mars, “The bunkers people are building now, they may outlast us. It could be some other species that emerges that eventually finds these . . . and they’re going to tell a story about a civilization that is afraid of itself.”⁷

Like bunkers, museums also serve as capsules, preserving a particular past— history as told by the victors. Both also speak to the value of insularity. Bunkers provide shelter and comfort, shielding residents from whatever blend of nuclear war/plague/climate crisis rages outside their walls. The museum, and Rist’s work in particular, offers a celebratory fantasy I can’t help feeling is undermined by the material reality that surrounds it.

The Geffen Contemporary is located in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. The streets around the building have recently been targets of sweeps that displace the area’s substantial unhoused population. MOCA’s staff just settled their first union contract after more than three years of organizing against low wages, layoffs, and safety hazards. Unlike bunkers, museums tend to be rebuilt and remade, especially in Los Angeles. Neighborhoods are demolished to make way for new art spaces, museum workers are exploited, and even art with an environmental emphasis emits carbon.

Rist’s show invites viewers to gather and dream together, but even while I’m in the space, I can’t stop thinking about when the dream is over, when we exit the museum, when the world she has so lovingly played with and documented becomes uninhabitable. I don’t want to embrace the collapse per se, as Rist at her most nihilistic seems to, but I wonder if we can take her vision further to seek out radical possibilities in rebuilding the future. I want to believe we can be sexy and fabulous and neighbors in struggle, all at once.

During one of my visits to Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor, two friends and I were watching Sip My Ocean when the screens went black and the moody atmosphere was replaced with glaring emergency lights. We immediately assumed there was an active shooter. My heart pounded until the guard assured us things were under control. We started drifting toward the emergency exit in confusion, but security herded everyone through the front of the museum instead. Once outside, we milled around; it seemed like most of the surrounding neighborhood had lost power too. We squinted in the bright afternoon, abuzz with excitement. Some people asked the museum staff for refunds, others chatted and speculated eagerly with each other. I felt, for a moment, a weird glimmer of a new day, born of our shared disruption.

Sara Selevitch is a writer and waitress living in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Longreads, Leste, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tele-Art Mag, Peach Mag, The Washington Post, and Eater. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts.

Is Ever All Over? Pipilotti Rist’s Survival Tactics

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